26. Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Six
Silas
T he next couple of weeks pass in a blur of sunrises and festivals and marathon baking afternoons. Also: tacky roadside attractions, grocery runs, and playlists (all of the kill-me-now cheery variety). There are quiet sunset conversations and rowdy nights around bonfires with some of the other vendors. And wedged in between are the phonecalls to Richard. Sometimes short and dismissive. Sometimes drawn out and liberating. But generally intense and draining.
The road days are the best. We use Jackie’s meticulously outlined itinerary as our blueprint, but I throw a few things in, too. It goes against her nature—mixing plans around and changing stuff last minute, but she lets me do it. And she only threw a small fit when I switched around a bunch of her colored sticky-notes just for shits and giggles.
So far, we’ve visited a crate museum, a three-storey outhouse, a dog chapel and a spiderweb farm. We’ve had lunch in the town that was the birthplace of earmuffs and filled up on penny candy at the world’s longest candy bar. We mourned the loss of Wavy Gravy, Schweddy Balls, and Vermonty Python at Ben the way she bounced back from everything she’s been through—especially knowing the way she used to be: weary and shy and cautious as hell. And just beat down. She was scared of taking up any room in the world and existed in whatever scraps of space other people discarded. Now, she’s totally claimed her space and man, does she ever own it. And then on top of that, she’s constantly working to expand it, too. Not necessarily for the right reasons, if you ask me, but still—it’s impressive as hell.
I have no idea how to get her to dump the guilt she’s so hung up on when it comes to Meryl and Richard and all the stuff that comes with her new fancy life. But then, she keeps trying to tell me that guilt is my issue. So yeah, could be a case of the pot calling the kettle black on this one. And who the hell knows? Maybe we’re both just destined to carry around the aftermath of that hellish afternoon for the rest of our lives and that’s all there is to it.
And while Jax may be rocking her book cover side-business, she hasn’t gotten any better at the baking aspect of her main summer gig. I’m the one who bakes the cookies most days, now. And not just to help her out. I do it as a service to the world at large. I sure as hell don’t have much to contribute in other areas, so if I can at least save a few dozen people from having to experience Jax’s horrible baking, then I’ll have done my part. Even if it’s in a small way, I’ll have improved people’s lives for the better.
Also on that front: we’re finding more and more ways to get away from cookie sales, and expanding to other stuff instead (okay, so I’m actively seeking out alternatives, while Jax randomly stumbles upon them, but still: the end result is the same - and either way, at the end of the day, the East Coast population reaps the benefits).
In addition to cotton candy, we’ve now added six different sugar cereal varieties to the menu. And candy necklaces, rock candy suckers, saltwater taffy, and marshmallow bananas. The marshmallows bananas don’t usually last until opening, though.
I’ve managed to keep my job loading and tearing down for shows, and Steve and I actually strike up a sort-of-but-not-really friendship. More like he looks out for me half the time and rails on me the other half. He’s worried about my drinking; he used to be an alcoholic, so I guess it’s some sort of natural inclination to keep other people going down that same path or something. Which is fine. And probably a good thing. But also, a huge pain in the ass. He’s a good guy though, so I humor him. Also, he has the power to fire me on a dime, so yeah, I do everything I can to stay on his good side.
Everything right now is a hundred times better than back home: the road-tripping and the festivals. Having a job. But mostly, getting closer to Jax. I tried to resist her. Like, I wanted to not be affected by every beautiful, perfect thing about her. But I caved. After that night when I told her the truth about how her mother died, and we fell asleep by the fire, I couldn’t pretend anymore that I didn’t respect the hell out of her. Even the way she stands by her toe-curling playlists, defending them like there’s legitimate merit behind the way she strings them randomly together in hour-long playlists/torture sessions.
They kill me. Seriously. I have forced myself to think of her playlists as daily tests I’m put through to prove myself worthy of being in her presence. Which is my justification for why they seem to get progressively worse every day. Because, swear to God, I’ll still be trying to wipe Taylor fucking Swift songs and 1980s pop ballads from my head well into my seventies. And it’ll still have been worth it.
That’s how much I like this girl: exploring with her, laughing with her and kissing her… Man, I love kissing her. And the conversations we have, that I swear, sometimes keep weaving through my thoughts for hours after we’ve moved on to more casual back-and-forth stuff.
Jax deserves so much better than me. And yet every day, she acts like I’m some shining fucking star. Like all the stuff I’ve done and the way I’ve acted is just a side dish, and I’m still the five-star main course. No one has ever been as kind to me as her. Even when we were little kids, she was the kindest kid in the neighborhood, so I mean it straight through to my tainted core, when I tell her she deserves every good thing that’s happened to her since her mother died. And even on days when it gets my back up—the way she wants to know every little thing about my past and gets it in her mind that it’s her job to fix me, I would still give her the world. I can’t give her the tar-soaked truths she begs me to share, but I’ll give her everything else.
And anyway, there’s no need for her to know every detail about the undue punches I’ve thrown over the years, or the trouble I got up to or the lies I’ve told, because it won’t change the fact that they happened. Or that I regret a lot of them. And it’s not that there’s anything I’ve done that’s so horrible it would make her want to walk away or anything. Because, let’s face it, if she stuck around after hearing that I shot her own mother, then I’m pretty sure my sorry ass is safe.
But I don’t want to spew all that other stuff to her because I want Jax to know the better parts of me—the parts from before that cursed afternoon in fifth grade and the parts after the night when she found me passed out in her bed in her camper. All the parts in between, I want to leave in the past. And if Jax really means it when she says she wants me to be happier and to move past the shit from my past, then she needs to be okay with that. Besides, I’ve already told her the darkest truth of all; the one that was the hardest to share, and that was the root of all the others .
Full disclosure: that last sentence is the Doc’s words—not mine. I told Richard the day after I told Jax—the truth about what really happened that horrible afternoon. I figured I had nothing to lose—that it was better if he pulled the plug on me hanging around his daughter now, before I got too attached, than a couple months from now, when he’d likely learn the truth anyway from Jackie, and we’d have even more history to sever.
If I’m being totally honest, I don’t think the Doc was too shocked when I told him how that night went down. He sure didn’t have the reaction I would have expected from him a month ago. But then he’s the one, out of anyone, who sees the actions of a little kid from a whole different perspective than most people could. He’s the one who got Jax to see that she wasn’t responsible for failing to see the mental health issues that led her mother to go off the rails. And so I guess, the way he feels about what I did is just another version of that same philosophy, only blown up tenfold. Because, let’s be honest: a kid shooting someone is still in a whole different league than a kid being oblivious to the seriousness of her mother’s depression.
Anyway, all this to say that I haven’t had any nightmares in a while. Since I told Jackie the truth. And since I’ve talked about it with Richard.
But….
I still dread the night-time.
Like, I literally start to think about sleep as soon as the sun sets, as if it’s this hellish gorge looming in front of me every single fucking evening. And just the thought of getting through it liquor-free puts me on edge. I get the sweats sometimes, for chrissake, just thinking about it—the idea of going without a drink once it’s past eight o’clock. Sometimes earlier. So even though I want to quit cold turkey, it’s just too hard. So I’ve reached a compromise.
I only let myself drink from one of the bottles I always have stashed in my backpack, which I buy off the taco truck guy. And I only drink after Jax is asleep. Just enough that it helps me get to sleep.
I don’t drink before that—in the morning or afternoon. It’s a pact I’ve made with myself. But man, it’s hard to keep. Way harder than I thought .
Some mornings I actually re-route my walk to the stage for set-up just so that I bypass the beer tent. And other times, even if it’s not a day when I’m working, I do the opposite. I wander past it just to be close to all those cases of beer. Like maybe I’ll absorb some of the alcohol just from being near it. Inebriation by osmosis or something. It’s stupid, and it makes no sense at all, to put myself through this insane brand of torture. Especially since every time I do it, it gets harder and harder to resist. And yet still, I keep doing it.
It’s this constant push-and pull… Lure and resistance.
I hate how it consumes me.
So even though I’ve been sleeping better once I finally crash, in some ways, night-time is even harder now than before. Because now I feel like I’m keeping this horrible secret from Jackie. I know she’d hate knowing that I’m drinking every night. She doesn’t get that I need it in order to just get to sleep.
So really, I’ve just traded one secret in for a new one.
But at least I’ve learned over the past seven years that I’m good at keeping secrets.